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L.A. Magazine Touts Pomona Professor for City's Poet Laureate

Story Date:

June 13, 2014

Los Angeles Magazine is touting Pomona College Professor of English Claudia Rankine to be the city of Los Angeles' new poet laureate. The winner will be announced later in July and the term lasts for two years, from August 2014 to October 2016.

In praise of Rankine's Don'tLet Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) collection, Los Angeles Magazinewrites:

"Rankine fuses essayistic writing with poetry fragments and images to achieve a sense of hybridity, wonder, and verve."

Her much anticipated collection, Citizen: An American Lyric, will be released in October.

The College's Henry G. Lee Professor of English, Rankine was recently awarded the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, a $50,000 award that honors an American poet of exceptional talent who deserves wider recognition. With Pomona since 2006, Rankine was elected chancellor of the Academy of American Poets last year, a position held in the past by W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich. She has been awarded fellowships by the Academy of American Poets, the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Rankine is the author of three other collections of poetry: Plot (2001), The End of the Alphabet (1998) and Nothing in Nature is Private (1994)

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